Ric Ocasek Quotes

They're caught where there's no way out or where you can't see out. What are you going to do about it? I don't have the answer. If I did there would be no insane asylums. But I see a lot of people, a lot of my friends in the same predicament. Many times in my life, I was there myself.

I proceed, gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of insane persons within the Commonwealth, in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens—chained naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.

When I was a visitor to a lunatic asylum I always noticed how well the worst lunatics looked.

Look, isn't there any way you can just stamp me as not crazy and let me get outta here.

I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.

People get really irritated by mental illness.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

In the 1830s, Dorothea Dix revolutionized the care of people with mental illness by taking them out of jails and caring for them in asylums, later known as state hospitals.

Prison's a walk in the park compared with being sectioned, mate, it really is.

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.

When they are treated, the seriously mentally ill aren't more violent than the general population. If untreated, though, they are.

A first visit to a madhouse is always a shock.

I think that every young person is a little mentally ill, you know? If we're not totally shutting down, we're all a little bit mentally ill in our twenties and maybe into our early thirties.

I've spent my life visiting a handful of people who are very close to me when they've been committed to one hospital or another in New York.

I've been insane from a very early age.

It was either therapy or die.

We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.

Deinstitutionalization has succeeded in decreasing the overall number of hospital beds, but an unforeseen consequence has been the proportional increase in the number of people with mental illnesses housed in the criminal justice system. Worse, once imprisoned, people with mental illness are shown to have much longer incarcerations than other inmates, primarily because a prison environment and lack of treatment aggravate the very illness that has led to their objectionable or antisocial behavior.

The majority of the people in jail are suffering from mental illness.

I've always had mental problems, so to speak.

I will tell you, I feel very, very bad for Kanye West. He's not well, and that is the very foundation of everything he says.

It is important to note that most of the patients in Ohio's mental health facilities have never committed crimes. They are institutionalised because they have lost touch with reality and are having problems functioning unaided in the community.

You can't live in this world but there's nowhere else to go.

The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials.

Lord keep her safe since you can't keep her sane.